Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) is the continuous discovery, classification and risk assessment of sensitive data in cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments. The focus is on the question of where critical data resides, who can access it and what risk arises from excessive permissions, misconfigurations or uncontrolled proliferation.

To this end, DSPM tools automatically inventory data holdings across SaaS, IaaS and PaaS services, detecting shadow and copied data as well, classify content by sensitivity and analyze access paths. The result is a prioritized risk view: Which sensitive data is excessively shared, unencrypted or stored in places where it should not be?

For classification: while Security Posture describes the security state of an organization as a whole, DSPM focuses on the data level. And while Data Loss Prevention controls data movements, DSPM first creates the necessary transparency about the holdings themselves – the two complement each other. The resulting data map is at the same time a valuable basis for Data Governance.